I'm back to the black pages again

I'm torn between the light and dark,
Where others see their target - divine symmetry
... Tethered to the logic of homo sapien,
Can't take my eyes from the great salvation of bullshit faith

    -- David Bowie (Quicksand)
 

This is the emergency part of the bulletin.  We do not live in a free society.  We cannot live and love as we please.  So stop saying 'It's a free country!' like a dumbass.

Read Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four.  But before you do, drop the common-knowledge polemic about how it's a Red Scare book, or a warning of the evils of totalitarian regimes.  That is a lie that has been used ever since I first heard of Orwell, to diminish the power of 1984 as a work.

Anyone who has been through this site will no doubt be familiar with my argument that the meaning of the book is ensconced in every word of which it consists, and can't be summed up with any amount of politicized homilies.

Read 1984 and look around.  I had a convo with Fred today in which I cited it.  We were talking about how sometimes in the performing world you can hate someone but respect them anyway.  Namely, one holds two seemingly contradictory ideas in one's head at the same nonce, but without acting in two ways.  Read 1984.  Read 1984.  That's doublethink I'm talking about.

Doublethink isn't something that they practise in Abu Ghraib, it's not a CIA secret, it's not just how George Bush gets through a day without barfing up owl pellets full of the US Bill of Rights.  Doublethink is here and it is there and everywhere.

There are really many people who think it's normal to suffer through a sixty-year work life and spend the dry-sticks years trying to make up for their lost vitality.  That scares the shit out of me.

Okay, I'm gonna scare you just a little bit now: Ted Kaczynski was right.  Not about everything, but about the Left.  No-one is more dangerous to progress than the people who propagate so prodigiously that going through the system can effect positive change in the system itself.  That is a fat lie.  It's like imagining that an inner-tuber can alter the course of a river.

And Foucault was right.  Concepts such as 'acceptable' and 'polite' change to suit the powermongers.  But who changes them?  Who can we blame if we don't feel free?  I'm afraid it's you and I who are maintaining the machines.
 

On to art.  My art is unnacceptable.  It is impolite and refuses to compromise.  And, it has come to my attention, it is almost universally misunderstood.  Art is how we communicate.  It's how kids learn emotions are powerful things that can stand outside themselves and affect everyone.  And if you haven't experienced the natural-disaster impartiality of an astonishing work of art, it's that much more impossible to relate to 'these walking insects' (Rollins), people, and know to treat them right.  That's when you get the Spies, Orwell's heartless little policy-driven shit kid monsters.

Art is seldom something I consider and conceptualize in advance, and that's hard for a lot of people to understand.  Art is an unqualified exercise of my ego and will to create.  So damn it, if I start sketching a rock and go on to paint a pheasant, don't get snippy if you didn't see the pheasant in the rock like I did.  Go paint your rock - it'll probably be more rocklike than anything I could paint.  Don't get bent out of shape over your inability to see the world the way I do.  That's actually your greatest strength and safeguard.

And KNOW YOUR PLACE.  I've been doing this coffee-house show every week for a year, and I am amazed at how many people have tried to wrest control of the flow, take stage from me.  Is our respect at such a low ebb?  Are we become so egomaniacal and greedy for affection that we will step on the toes of one who plays free music for us?  Yes.  I just gotta say yes.  I have been doing stage shows for too long to have comfortable illusions about this.  People hate people with talent because they imagine they are in some way subtracting from the affection they themselves deserve.

Here's another one.  ART PROFESSIONALS.  One of the sketchiest things I have ever done is try to exhibit my paintings.  I'm not going to name names.  But I have entrusted things to people and had them come back obviously damaged with not a word said.  I have been shorted time on the wall.  I have been told I can put up anything that won't disturb the clientele, then told I can't keep something up because it didn't look like the materials I used were expensive enough.  The people who did this to me should have felt god-damned lucky to have an artist who went to the trouble of being professional.  By god I sucked it up and thanked them at the end having given them a great show.  But what I should have done is torn a strip off them for treating me like shit.  I really need to start being a bigger bastard to people if I ever want to realize any standard of accountability for the dorks I encounter.

Can I do that in Victoria?  Can I manage in this uptight, dear little snotty town where people are so sleepy, and take umbrage so easily and criticism so poorly?  We'll see.
 

It is tragickally hilarious to me how the ones whom society most venerates, the storytellers and rockers and pretty ones, are always given the shittiest possible circumstances to start from.  You'll always be cold-calling or cold-mailing some jerk and most likely get nothing in response.  Or they'll try to teach you how they think you should do it.  Or you'll run into the myriad of assholes who variously imagine it is necessary to the foundation of the universe that an art career should require a parallel day job; implying that art is too worthless to live from; or that artists are faggots with low morals and no aspirations, and art's for sissies to talk about who can't buy real estate and cause themselves to matter.

LET ME TELL YOU.  Artists are jerks just like the rest of us.  The reason I'm so weird has nothing to do with my occupation.  I have weird skin.  I had certain experiences growing up.  That makes me weird.  The fact that I fill my lifetime with creating art does nothing to change the basis of who I am.  It's not art's fault that I go through long spates of doing nothing but writing, painting, composing and recording, and then have days on end when all I can do is sleep and read, and I feel like I want to die.  Because I realize then that I have no occupation in life that isn't making art (in as many words).  And if I don't feel like making art, there's nothing I can do.  Word to the wise - if you're going to have a joyful little inconsequential hobby to distract you from your life's toil and help you decompress, don't try and make it painting if you're a painter.

As a result I feel very hollow sometimes.  The other end of the spectrum is spectacular: to know that I'm not shitting out a day job that doesn't matter.  To feel fully in-use.  But know that my diligence is only partly intentional, and is partly my complex.  The world couldn't stand a population of me's, and that's not what I want.
 

No, I want everyone to wake the FUCK up.  And don't imagine you can get off and make it nice for yourself, even if you've read your Tao and recycle and have had a couple traumatic experiences so you feel reasonably justified in saying you've Been There.  This is not going to be pretty.  I laugh in the face of the much-touted material Apocalypse, peak oil, water wars, the Rapture and all this tommyrot.  The real Apocalypse will be mental.  And it will inflict horror.

Nobody flip out.

© 2009